1. is the circumflex accent only used when vowels are contracted?2. In my "Reading Greek" text, the section dealing with lawlessness in Athens, both the words for bad government and good government beginwith capitalized letters. why?3. why in some words does the alpha have an iota subscript? why isn't it the diphthong ai?4. is the iota subscript pronounced?

gigas phoberos wrote:1. is the circumflex accent only used when vowels are contracted?

No.

gigas phoberos wrote:2. In my "Reading Greek" text, the section dealing with lawlessness in Athens, both the words for bad government and good government begin with capitalized letters. why?

I have no idea. It is my understanding that in antiquity, only capital letters were known, and lowercase letters, along with accents and breath marks, were introduced later. In my Greek books, most sentences start with lowercase. Only proper names seem to start with caps. Are the words for bad government and good government personifications?

gigas phoberos wrote:3. why in some words does the alpha have an iota subscript? why isn't it the diphthong ai?

Hi, I have a copy of the book and looked up that passage, and I think the authors are just trying to emphasize that the words are to be taken to mean "The Good/Bad Government" as universal types, rather than just some individual governments that happen to be good or bad. In modern editions abstract nouns that are meant to be personified or generalized in this way are often capitalized.

About 1, remember the accent rule that when a word is accented on the second-to-last syllable, if that syllable contains a long vowel or dipthong and the final syllable contains a short vowel (and also most οι and αι), then the accent must be circumflex (and conversely, if the final syllable contains a long vowel or diphthong, the accent must be acute). So you have things like πολίτης but πολῖται. I believe this rule has no exceptions.

This by the way implies that the only place where there's a possibility of having either the circumflex or acute accent is in the final syllable of the word, and for there, besides contraction, another reason for the circumflex is that in the genitive and dative, if the ending is accented then it takes the circumflex (if it can). I want to say that this is always the case, but I'm too lazy to check right now, but it's certainly true for the 1st and 2nd declensions (βουλῆς, ὁδοῖς) but it seems to be true elsewhere too (γυναικῶν, τινῶν, ἡμῖν). I believe also that the adverb ending -ως always has the circumflex when accented. I wouldn't be surprised if those cover the vast majority of circumflexes.

And for 3, noticing the iota subscript is useful for distinguishing different forms, e.g. you have nom. sing. ἡμέρα, dat. sing. ἡμέρᾳ, nom. plur. ἡμέραι. I think it's relatively rare to see the iota subscript in the root of words (like ῥᾴδιος) so those are hard to remember for me, but since most of them occur in endings, they're easier to learn and helpful in distinguishing words.

hi modus, on 1, remember that words built with an enclitic at the end don't follow that rule (the σωτῆρα rule), e.g. ὥστε not *ὧστε, ἥδε not *ἧδε (and also the crasis of τὸ ἔργον into τοὔργον, although opinions on this differ: see smyth s173(a):